failed at checkpoint error message

am working on a dimension 4300 that gives me one quick beep then nothing else. when the dell is booting it gets about 80% then it just hangs now when i boot the machine it keeps giving " failed at checkpoint - dskt " but the checkpoint variable keeps changing everytime i try to boot now its saying CChk but it different everytime.

have never seen this before. not able to boot off floppy or cd drive to even be able to run diags.

anyone have any idea what this error is telling me ???

thanks ahead of time.

 

Clear CMOS, possibly replace CMOS battery and reset your BIOS. Should get you back up unless you have a bad motherboard or have lost something due to static charge. That may already be the case with your floppy drive.

 

Rockster2U

so far when i removed the pci devices and replaced the psu the machine finally started acting better. able to do some diags and ended up replacing the h.d. also. modem seems to be the problem when attached to the board. remove it and it boots install it and it dies. pc certifies diags seem to have a problem with the memory but i ran memory tester for hours and no errors were found.

those were weird messages and all i could find sorta pointed to a rom chip on the board having some problems which could mean the board could be bad. so far though machine seems much better.

thanks.

 

Sometimes "much better" doesn't say much. I think you have enough going on there to clearly warrant a new motherboard. The tough question is what else is or isn't salvageable?



Edit:
Speculative guess - that machine took a hit from mother nature through the modem. Had an electrical storm recently? No surge protection on the phone lines? No UPS on the system?